Dear Rachel,
I am writing this on an American Airlines flight to Tokyo Narita Airport. Four and a half hours into the flight. I'm watching a bad romantic comedy about, well, romance. But it's so bad that I neither want to fall in love nor have children.
Oh Rachel. I feel so young and so confused, only pretending to know what I'm doing. Like laughing at jokes I don't understand. I'm waiting for the moment when my deep intellectual paralysis and dysfunction could give way to something a little more presentable to the world.
And it's frightening because there is but one chance to do everything we ever want to do. Ever. And I'm terrified of failing -- how could I not be after growing up with only the knowledge of one lucky success after another. But, to spend a lifetime waiting for the extraordinary that never comes... well, I couldn't shed enough tears.
I am so afraid of being hurt. The human heart and the human ego are the two most fragile things I know. I wouldn't be able to get over a failure on this scale and still be the same person...
It's unfinished. Which is just as well. I fear I need more time to be able to write an optimistic conclusion to this sad, sad pile of fear and insecurities.
3 comments:
Dear--
I was talking to a friend the other day about how I worry that my conversation is incredibly dull because I reveal too much of my insecurity and academia-related angst. He said that he was just amazed that he hadn't driven away everyone he knew through his own angst.
I find it very reassuring (I suppose?) or at least heartening to know that someone else suffers the same doubts and worries as I do. And although I fear that incessantly discussing them with each other only magnifies them, maybe we are actually (slowly) working through our issues. Maybe. :)
--me
Sweetheart, I was told that angst, or at least our brand of angst, is itself an indicator of privilege. The albatross of my youth!
Far from being alone in our angst, I am firmly convinced that everyone struggles through a constant trauma of his own making. Isn't the modernist movement the attempts of an entire generation of intellectuals to grapple with their angst?
For all the implications of self-indulgence and presumption, I think angst is humbling in a way, and it hints at the questions -- what are my obligations to society? how can I be happy? how do I know that my experience is part of the human experience? -- that drive human existence.
I like your treatise--"In Defense of Angst."
I have always thought of angst (or at least my angst) as our uniquely postmodern malaise, but now that I think about it, I'm not so sure. Surely our angst comes in a rather modern form and has its modern causes and expressions, but if I think about whether angst has Modernity as its source or just human psychology, I inevitably return to the Tale of Genji.
Other premodern literature doesn't seem to reflect the same level of self-aware (self-absorbed) angst, but the Genji really hints at psychological complexities of the kind that we don't normally associate with premodern societies (where we patronizingly assume that people who lived in 'simpler' times had 'simpler' minds?).
But again, the people who feel these emotions in the Genji are aristocrats of the highest order with really very little to do other than jockey for power, fumble about with the arts, and pursue love.
KIND OF LIKE US ha.
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